A Call for Help

What the Kitty Genovese story really means.

A. M. Rosenthal (far right) believed that apathetic bystanders, not just Winston Moseley, were to blame for Genovese’s death.Credit Photography from (left to right): New York Times / Redux; Corbis; AP

Plucking a few events out of the vastness of the world and declaring them to be the news of the day is a mysterious and complicated project. Sometimes what’s news is inarguable—the outbreak of war, a head-of-state transition, natural calamity—but very often it falls into the category of the resonant incident. It isn’t a turn in the course of history, but it strikes editors as illustrative of something important. Take crime. If crimes don’t involve anyone powerful or well known, they generally aren’t considered news. But a few such crimes do become news, big news, and hold the public’s imagination in a tight, enduring grip.

An excellent example is the murder of Kitty Genovese, a twenty-eight-year-old bar manager, by Winston Moseley, a twenty-nine-year-old computer punch-card operator, just after three in the morning on Friday, March 13, 1964, in Kew Gardens, Queens. The fact that this crime, one of six hundred and thirty-six murders in New York City that year, became an American obsession—condemned by mayors and Presidents, puzzled over by academics and theologians, studied in freshman psychology courses, re-created in dozens of research experiments, even used four decades later to justify the Iraq war—can be attributed to the influence of one man, A. M. Rosenthal, of the New York Times.

In 1964, Rosenthal was forty-one years old and relatively new on the job as the newspaper’s metropolitan editor, an important step in his ascent to a seventeen-year reign over the Times’ newsroom. Ten days after Genovese was killed, he went downtown to have lunch with New York City’s police commissioner, Michael Murphy. Murphy spent most of the lunch talking about how worried he was that the civil-rights movement, which was at its peak, would set off racial violence in New York, but toward the end Rosenthal asked him about a curious case, then being covered in the tabloids, in which two men had confessed to the same murder. He learned that one of the competing confessors, Winston Moseley, had definitely murdered a woman in Kew Gardens, Kitty Genovese. That killing had been reported at the time, including in a four-paragraph squib buried deep within the Times, but Murphy said that what had struck him about it was not the crime itself but the behavior of thirty-eight eyewitnesses. Over a grisly half hour of stabbing and screaming, Murphy said, none of them had called the police. Rosenthal assigned a reporter named Martin Gansberg to pursue the story from that angle. On March 27th, the Times ran a front-page story under a four-column headline:

37 WHO SAW MURDER DIDN’T CALL THE POLICE

Apathy at Stabbing of Queens Woman Shocks Inspector

The following day, the Times ran a reaction story in which a procession of experts offered explanations of what had happened, or said that it was inexplicable. From then on, the story—as they wouldn’t have said in 1964—went viral.

It’s evidence of a kind of editorial genius that Rosenthal, by playing the story in the way that he did, was able to get such a reaction. The tabloids had treated it simply as a sensational tale of urban violence. The Times made sure that its apathetic-witness angle would land by prominently displaying the story on its front page. The murder now stood for a profoundly disturbing sociological trend. The key line in Gansberg’s story came from one of the witnesses (none of whom were named), who said, “I didn’t want to get involved.”

Some of the fascination that racialized, sexualized violence attracts surely rubbed off on the story—it became clear from photographs and from other outlets that Genovese was white and attractive and that Moseley, a repeat rapist, was black—but the gist of the piece lent itself perfectly to Sunday sermons about a malaise encompassing all of us. It was a way of processing anxieties about the anonymity of urban life, about the breakdown of the restrictive but reassuring social conventions of the fifties, and, less directly, about racial unrest, the Kennedy assassination, and even the Holocaust, which was only beginning to be widely discussed, and which seemed to represent on a grand scale the phenomenon that one expert on the Genovese case calls Bad Samaritanism.

The Times’ version of the Genovese story represents a version of reality that was molded to conform to a theory. The March 27th story began “For more than half an hour 38 respectable, law-abiding citizens in Queens watched a killer stalk and stab a woman in three separate attacks in Kew Gardens. . . . Not one person telephoned the police during the assault; one witness called after the woman was dead.” Later that year, Rosenthal published a very short instant book, the only book he ever wrote on his own, called “Thirty-eight Witnesses: The Kitty Genovese Case,” which used portentous, outraged language to enshrine the apathy narrative. (He urged readers “to recognize that the bell tolls even on each man’s individual island, to recognize that every man must fear the witness in himself who whispers to close the window.”) By the eighties, a widely used college psychology textbook drew this scenario from the Times account: “What is interesting about this event is that no fewer than 38 of her neighbors came to their windows at 3:00 AM in response to her screams of terror—and remained at their windows in fascination for the 30 minutes it took her assailant to complete his grisly deed, during which time he returned for three separate attacks.”

“We Tuscany. The cell reception was fantastic and the Wi-Fi was to die for.”Buy the print »

It’s now clear that this version of events is wrong, thanks to a number of Genovese revisionists who have emerged over the years. They include Jim Rasenberger, a journalist who has written a couple of influential articles about the case, notably one in the Times, in 2004; and Rachel Manning, Mark Levine, and Alan Collins, the authors of a 2007 article in American Psychologist (which quotes from, and debunks, the textbook rendering). The essential facts are these. Winston Moseley had been out in his car, looking for a victim, when he came across Genovese driving home from work. He followed her. She parked at the Kew Gardens train station, adjacent to her apartment. Moseley parked, too, and attacked her with a hunting knife. She screamed, and a man named Robert Mozer opened his window and shouted, “Leave that girl alone!” Moseley ran away. Genovese, wounded but not mortally, staggered to the back of her apartment building and went inside a vestibule. Moseley returned, found her, and attacked again, stabbing her and assaulting her sexually. He fled again before she died.

The Times story was inaccurate in a number of significant ways. There were two attacks, not three. Only a handful of people saw the first clearly and only one saw the second, because it took place indoors, within the vestibule. The reason there were two attacks was that Robert Mozer, far from being a “silent witness,” yelled at Moseley when he heard Genovese’s screams and drove him away. Two people called the police. When the ambulance arrived at the scene—precisely because neighbors had called for help—Genovese, still alive, lay in the arms of a neighbor named Sophia Farrar, who had courageously left her apartment to go to the crime scene, even though she had no way of knowing that the murderer had fled.

The one indisputable villain in the Genovese case, other than Moseley, was Joseph Fink, who worked in the apartment building across the street from where Genovese lived. He saw the first attack, did nothing, and, after Moseley had fled, took a nap in the basement, rather than going outside to help Genovese. A more ambiguous figure was Karl Ross, a friend and neighbor of Genovese’s, who was drunk that night. He heard the first attack and did nothing. The second attack occurred in the vestibule outside his apartment door. He opened the door a crack, saw Moseley plunging a knife into Genovese, and closed the door, terrified. He made a couple of phone calls, the first to a friend on Long Island, who advised him to do nothing, the second to a neighbor in the building, who told him to come over. Ross crawled out of his window, across the roof, and into a neighbor’s apartment, and eventually called the police. It may or may not be relevant that Ross was thought to be gay, at a time when gay New Yorkers had a lot to fear, both from attackers on the street and from the police. Three months before the murder, Rosenthal had assigned a five-thousand-word story that ran on the Times’ front page under the headline “GROWTH OF OVERT HOMOSEXUALITY IN CITY PROVOKES WIDE CONCERN.” The fact that Kitty Genovese herself was gay evidently escaped his notice.

Winston Moseley certainly led a highly compartmentalized life. He was steadily employed, a married man with two children, and he owned a single-family house in South Ozone Park, Queens. He also routinely broke into people’s houses and stole television sets, which is what led to his apprehension for Genovese’s murder, five days later. Somebody who saw him leaving a house with a TV called the police, and in the course of being questioned Moseley confessed to a number of gruesomely sexualized murders of young women, including Genovese’s; another murder he had committed; and one that he hadn’t committed. (The last created the double-confession story that Rosenthal had asked the police commissioner about.) At Moseley’s trial, a few months later, because of the pervasiveness of the apathy narrative, the prosecution decided not to call Joseph Fink or Karl Ross as witnesses, even though they could have offered the most direct accounts of the murder. Still, Moseley had confessed to the murder; the trial was about whether he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity. The jury convicted him. Today, at seventy-nine, Moseley is the longest-serving inmate in the New York prison system.

Aside from the guilty reflections it inspired, the Genovese case had some tangible consequences. It helped in the push to establish 911 as an easy-to-remember national police emergency number; in 1964, the most reliable way to call the police in New York was to use the specific telephone number of each precinct, and caller response wasn’t always a high priority. Two psychologists, Bibb Latané and John Darley, created a new realm of research into what came to be called the bystander effect, the main finding of which is that your likelihood of intervening in a Genovese-like incident increases if you believe that there are very few other bystanders. The effect has stood up through repeated experiments. In 1977, Winston Moseley, engaged in a periodic attempt to be granted parole, had the chutzpah to argue in a Times Op-Ed piece that his misdeed had wound up making the world a better place: “The crime was tragic, but it did serve society, urging it as it did to come to the aid of its members in distress or danger.”

The fiftieth anniversary of the Genovese murder has generated two full-length books about the case: “Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime That Changed America,” by Kevin Cook (Norton), and “Kitty Genovese: A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences,” by Catherine Pelonero (Skyhorse). Both authors have interviewed everyone there is to interview and reviewed the public records about the case, but so much attention has preceded their efforts that they wind up working from nearly identical sets of facts, and it sometimes feels as if they were straining to stretch their accounts to book length. Both have decided to write in the true-crime style, which entails occasionally telling us what people may have thought or felt, or presenting as quoted dialogue unrecorded private scenes from long ago—an unfortunate decision, given how much the story turns on the trustworthiness of journalism.

Cook is the more adept storyteller of the two. His peppy, knowing style calls to mind pop-culture products from the time of the murder, like the magazine Argosy or the television crime drama “Naked City.” And he is firmly, and persuasively, in the revisionist camp. He says that Moseley’s prosecutors concluded that there were only five or six witnesses who could plausibly testify at the trial. Pelonero is an anti-revisionist, who presents herself as a defender of the sullied reputation of Martin Gansberg, the Times reporter on the story, and as someone who insists that the unpleasant truth about Genovese’s neighbors’ behavior not be dodged. Her count of true witnesses, gleaned from police records, is thirty-three. (According to Cook, the prosecutors who interviewed potential witnesses found that most didn’t grasp what had been going on.) “Historical revisionism of the Kitty Genovese story was underway, and the beautiful twilight of falsehood did indeed enhance it into something far less blinding than the burning glare of the truth,” Pelonero writes, with more passion than clear meaning.

“Larry and I invited you here tonight to take our focus off each other.”Buy the print »

The Kitty Genovese who emerges from these books was an appealingly independent woman who had grown up in a large middle-class Italian-American Catholic family in Brooklyn but decided not to follow when everyone else left the city for New Canaan, Connecticut. A brief marriage in her teens was annulled; she was once arrested for being a minor participant in a bookmaking operation (the most familiar photograph of her is a mug shot); and, for a year before her murder, she had been in a happy relationship with a woman named Mary Ann Zielonko, who shared her apartment in Kew Gardens and who also worked in a bar in Queens.

Winston Moseley is a truly chilling character, because of his ability to be utterly calm and functional most of the time, even when describing to officials the horrifically violent acts he had performed on female strangers. In 1968, he jammed a tin can into his rectum so tightly that he had to be sent to a hospital. He escaped and, rather than melting into the landscape, quickly committed two more rapes. After he was caught and returned to Attica, he became a model prisoner again.

The third main character in the drama is Abe Rosenthal. He appears only intermittently in the two books about the case, but no matter; he told his own story. In 1999, he wrote a new introduction for a paperback edition of his “Thirty-eight Witnesses,” timed to the thirty-fifth anniversary of the murder; and in 2008 Melville House republished the package, with an introduction by Samuel Freedman, as part of a series called Classic Journalism.

Back in 1927, in “The Rise of American Civilization,” Charles and Mary Beard wrote about how the New York World, in its heyday under Joseph Pulitzer, became America’s first mass-circulation newspaper: “It exploited to the utmost limit the tragedy and comedy of contemporary life, in all its component elements of sex, society, crime, perversion, love, romance, and emotion generally.” Although the Times was always far more respectable than the World, that passage comports with Rosenthal’s description of how he approached the Genovese story: “News is not philosophy or theology but what certain human beings, reporters and editors, know will have meaning and interest to other human beings, readers.” He describes processing the police commissioner’s remark about the thirty-eight silent witnesses as “vicarious shock . . . the realization that what you are seeing or hearing will startle a reader.”

It was obviously disingenuous for Rosenthal to suggest that he had no personal reaction to the Genovese murder—that he was merely making a clinical professional judgment about what would engage readers. His book, like most of his writing, is wildly emotional. The idea of the silent witnesses touched him in some deep, primal way: “there is in the tale of Catherine Genovese a revelation about the human condition so appalling to contemplate that only good can come from forcing oneself to confront the truth.” What’s more, “there must be some connection between the story of the witnesses silent in the face of greater crimes—the degradation of a race, children hungering.” Rosenthal’s convictions about the crime were so powerful that he was impervious to the details of what actually happened. His summary of the case appropriated the high drama of the Times piece, asserting “the choking fact that thirty-eight of her neighbors had seen her stabbed or heard her cries, and that not one of them, during that hideous half-hour, had lifted the telephone in the safety of his own apartment to call the police and try to save her life.” By 1999, it had become clear that the original story might have been overstated, but in his new introduction Rosenthal was even less restrained: “Neighbors heard her scream her last half hour away and did nothing, nothing at all, to give her succor or even cry alarm.”

In 2004, at a fortieth-anniversary conference about the case that was held at Fordham, Rosenthal made an appearance, and announced from the lectern that his sister Bess had died many years earlier after an incident that, to his mind, had been Genovese-like. (Rosenthal, who grew up in the Bronx, had a spectacularly horrible childhood; his father and four of his five older sisters died young, and he was usually on crutches, because of a bone disease.) Bess had been walking home when a flasher exposed himself to her; terrified, she ran all the way home. Then she caught a bad cold, and never recovered. To Rosenthal, the incident and the fatal illness were one. “A sexual pervert jumped out of the bushes and exposed himself to her,” Rosenthal said. “I still miss our darling Bess, and feel Bess was murdered by this criminal who took her life away, no less than the monster who killed Kitty Genovese.”

That seemed to explain a lot about Rosenthal’s handling of the Genovese story, though his own writing makes it clear that he was profoundly disturbed by just about every way in which New York was changing in the sixties. Kevin Cook treats Rosenthal’s 2004 disclosure at Fordham as a Rosebud moment in his narrative, to be saved almost until the end for maximum effect. Pelonero, the defender of the original Times story, chooses not to mention it.

When it comes to assessing the media, it’s hard to get riled about press-generated hysteria over insubstantial matters like Justin Bieber’s legal troubles or Mayor de Blasio’s car running stop signs (unless, perhaps, you’re directly on the receiving end of it). Stories like that of the silent witnesses to Kitty Genovese’s murder represent the real danger zone in journalism, because they blend the power of instinct—which is about whether something feels true, not about whether it is true—with the respectable sheen of social science. In his book, Rosenthal groused, “I did not feel, nor do I now, that the sociologists and psychiatrists who commented contributed anything substantial to anybody’s understanding of what happened that night on Austin Street.” But, if he hadn’t assigned a second-day story consisting of quotes from such people, his version of the Genovese murder would not have taken the shape that it did. The experts transformed a crime into a crisis.

The manufacturing of the thirty-eight-witnesses myth had generally benign social effects. Yet there are many examples in which tendentious public renderings of violence have set off more, and worse, violence. (Many of the lynchings in the South during the Jim Crow era were undertaken to avenge a crime that the mob, confirmed in its rage by the local press, felt certain had taken place.) The real Kitty Genovese syndrome has to do with our susceptibility to narratives that echo our preconceptions and anxieties. So the lesson of the story isn’t that journalists should trust their gut, the way Abe Rosenthal did. Better to use your head. ♦

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.